As a service provider or carrier, detailed usage data is the lifeblood of your business. If all the data you need is already being delivered directly to you, using a common, searchable format; filtered to include the most relevant information only; correlated to customer activity and jurisdiction; you are in the minority. Count yourself lucky, and stop reading now. The rest of you know that data is not presented in a nice, tidy package with a bow on top. And that means mediation is the first essential step to everything you do.

You might not use the term 'mediation' when describing your business practices, but if you are collecting, processing, preparing, and/or correlating your usage data in any fashion, you are mediating data. Mediation ensures that your usage data is efficiently extracted and correctly prepared through normalization, filtering, enrichment, and transformation for downstream processes. The process occurs largely behind the scenes, yet deserves attention.

Here are five key reasons to prioritize mediation:

  1. Mediation represents the initial failure point in business processes, with errors cascading through multiple downstream systems, necessitating automated error notifications.
  2. Service provider success depends on actionable data; mediation systems must collect from multiple sources, handle various formats, normalize records, and transform them appropriately.
  3. Mediation enriches data by combining usage records with datasets like billing information and customer-specific data, enabling analytics and identifying growth opportunities.
  4. Automated, optimized mediation systems deliver cost and time savings through real-time processing, business rule filtering, and historical data warehousing.
  5. Mediation should integrate with broader business strategy, feeding revenue assurance platforms, in-house applications, databases, billing systems, report engines, or other OSS.

Equinox has provided mediation solutions since 1986. Their TeleLink platform supports over 250 data formats, ensuring carriers can efficiently process and act on their usage data regardless of network architecture.

About the Author — Amy Oldham works in Corporate Communications at Equinox Information Systems. To learn more about Equinox, visit equinoxis.com or call (615) 612-1200.